Our doctoral intern, Martina, will be delivering two lectures in April 2025. The first, History and the problem of sources: How to deal with the myths of museological sources, will take place on April 8, 2025, during the Cultural Studies Research session (Room FDV03) at 17.30. Her second lecture, Echoes of the past war: memory, culture, and the politics of commemoration in post-Yugoslav museums, will be held on April 16, 2025, as part of the Balkan Studies course (Room FDV16), which starts at 9.15. Both lectures are open to the public - everyone is warmly invited!

Martina is a visiting researcher at the Centre for Cultural and Religious Studies and is currently undergoing a doctoral internship within the MEMPOP research project, which will continue until the end of semester. Her extensive fieldwork, combined with the interdisciplinarity of her theoretical framework, has yielded valuable insights – ranging from methodological precision and finesse, to uncovering the broader cultural interrelations and the interpretative depth behind the fait d’accompli of museum collections. Beyond the discursive realm, her focus on the materiality of museum artefacts has allowed her to break free from low-dimensional analytical approaches.

Her first lecture, History and the problem of sources: How to deal with the myths of museological sources, will take place on the April 8 (Room FDV03) as part of the Cultural Studies Research course, designed for undergraduate students at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana. Given the course’s syllabus, Martina’s lecture will be methodologically oriented.

History and the problem of sources. How to deal with the myths of museological sources 

This seminar focuses on the methodological challenges of conducting historical research on war museums and memorial sites in the former Yugoslavia, emphasizing the collection, organization, and integration of diverse sources. Combining approaches from cultural history, memory studies, and material culture, the lesson examines how different types of sources—archival documents, museum collections, and oral testimonies—can be systematically analyzed to reconstruct narratives of war and post-conflict memory.  The lesson will primarily focus on the procedural aspects of historical research—what to look at in a museum, how to access museum archives, how to analyze museum installations and interpret exhibit captions, how to organize interviews with curators—as well as organizational aspects, such as how to systematize the available material. Thus, the seminar will provide guidance on available tools for archiving research materials – such as Zotero, Tropy, Tableau, Metadata – and offer practical considerations on how to keep an inventory and create a personal archive of documents.  

Through case studies from fieldwork conducted in museums in Bosnia and Croatia the seminar will provide practical insights into data collection techniques, fieldnotes organization, and source categorization. A central theme of the seminar will be the methodological integration of oral sources with material and documentary evidence. It will discuss how to triangulate oral testimonies with museum exhibits, written records, and material artifacts to build a comprehensive but rigorous analytical framework. By addressing these methodological challenges, the seminar aims to equip students with the tools needed to conduct interdisciplinary research using different types of historical sources through the presentation of a case study which can also offer insights into museums as spaces of historical negotiation and memory production. 

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A week later, Martina will deliver her second lecture entitled Echoes of the past war: memory, culture, and the politics of commemoration in post-Yugoslav museums, as part of the Balkan Studies course, which is offered at the Master’s level in the Cultural Studies programme. This lecture is scheduled for April 16, 2025 (Room FDV16), starting at 9.15. While the session will broadly address the politics of memory and commemoration, particular attention will be given (though not exclusively) to Bosnian memorial exhibitions and commemorative practices.

Echoes of the past war: memory, culture, and the politics of commemoration in post-Yugoslav museums 

Museums are spaces where collective memories are shaped and  preserved. In the post-Yugoslav region, however, they are also sites  where different interpretations of the past intersect, often within  national and political discourses. The seminar will present how museum  exhibitions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia construct narratives  about the wars of the 1990s. I will explore how museum artefacts,  scenography, and narrative frameworks influence the perception of the  past and how different communities engage with conflicting historical  interpretations. During the seminar, I will present examples from more  than twenty museums and memorial sites, including the War Childhood  Museum in Sarajevo, the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide,  and the Jasenovac Memorial Site. The research combines cultural history,  memory studies, and ethnographic fieldwork, offering a deeper insight  into the complexity of museum narratives and commemoration processes. 

Martina Ricci is a PhD candidate in Global History and Governance at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale (SSM) in Naples. Her research focuses on museology from a historical perspective, with a particular emphasis on war museums and memorial sites in the former Yugoslavia. Martina’s work is inherently multidisciplinary, integrating cultural history, memory studies, and material culture, with an emphasis on ethnographic methods and archival research. She is collaborating with the MEMPOP team in Ljubljana to explore also how folk and popular culture have been incorporated into museum installations to shape national identities in the post-Yugoslav landscape. Additionally, Martina has collaborated with the National Research Council (CNR) at the Institute of Mediterranean European History in Rome, where she contributed to projects addressing the intersections of history, culture, and memory in Mediterranean contexts.